Barr blames tweets but pattern persists
Attorney General wrong to get involved despite Trump’s social media solicitations
analysis
US Attorney General William Barr offered his first public comments yesterday since a controversy erupted at the Justice Department this week. And while he offered a significant rebuke of President Donald Trump, Barr’s comments seem as much geared toward creating a veneer of independence as addressing the root of the controversy.
Barr told ABC News that Trump’s tweets about ongoing criminal matters — in this case, Roger Stone’s — “make it impossible for me to do my job”.
“I think it’s time to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases,” Barr said.
Barr claims he made the controversial decision to overrule the career prosecutors’ recommendation that Stone serve seven to nine years in prison on Tuesday, before Trump tweeted on Wednesday in opposition to the recommendation.
“Do you go forward with what you think is the right decision, or do you pull back because of the tweet?” Barr said. “And that just sort of illustrates how disruptive these tweets can be.”
Barr is right that this is exactly why presidents are cautious about weighing in on ongoing criminal matters. If the president does that, how can you know that decisions aren’t being made in response to pressure?
But it’s also important to recognise how much Barr gains by being seen as rebuking Trump — and how much his answers don’t really address the true controversy here.
The fact is that, even if Barr made this decision before Trump’s tweets and Trump never directly requested the action — even if there is no relation between what happened and what Trump has said — this is still highly problematic. It’s the president’s most senior political appointee in the Justice Department personally intervening in an unorthodox manner in the case of perhaps Trump’s longest-serving political ally. It’s precisely the kind of case in which you’d try doubly hard to avoid even the appearance of political influence — whether that influence emanated from Trump or not. Instead, Barr decided this was the situation he needed to get involved in. And to be clear, Barr confirmed in the interview that he was personally responsible for the decision, which was as significant a revelation as anything else: “Barr said he told his staff that night that the Justice Department has to amend its recommendation. Hours later, the president tweeted that it was ‘horrible and very unfair’ and that ‘the real crimes were on the other side’,” ABC reported. So there it is: Trump’s own, appointed attorney general who has repeatedly taken controversial pro-Trump actions, doing so yet again. And just as Trump didn’t have to tell Barr to do what he did with the Mueller report to make that controversial, he didn’t have to tell him what to do with Stone’s sentencing recommendation to make it controversial.
You could make a pretty compelling argument that Barr isn’t rebuking Trump so much as telling the president how to take the heat off some of his more controversial decisions.
If Barr had a more varied history when it comes to decisions that directly involve the president, it would be easier to accept that this is truly about the independence of the Justice Department. But Barr hasn’t been concerned about the perception that he’s not independent before, and we should focus more on his actions than on an apparent rebuke of presidential tweets.